The First Next Session

In my letter, I had told Sam that I was done, that I couldn’t see her anymore. She didn’t want to accept that.

Matt,

I hear and feel the pain and anger you are expressing, and I’m deeply sorry you are feeling this way.  I understand that right now for you the safety of our relationship is in question but I am hoping that we can bring what you’ve said here back into the realm of our being able to talk about it together.  Would you be willing to talk sometime before Thursday?  I have times both Monday and Tuesday.

Sam email June 12, 2021

This was the day of my letter, but two weeks since we’d last spoken on the day my breakdown started. I replied.

Sam,

My entire foundation of trust is fractured. I do not have faith that there is sufficiently close alignment between what you say to me and what you feel. I am not sure what positive thing would come from our speaking in that context… I can’t handle another hour like the last two. 

Matt email June 12, 2021

She eventually talked me back into speaking with her to try to “more clearly know what caused this,” though I was pretty clear what caused it. And so we spoke a few days later. Mainly, she spoke, and I will include here excerpts, both written and with sound so you can hear our voices. You will hear mostly her, but you will hear me snuffling throughout.

You’ll also hear how much more she broke through boundaries. If you remember the post where I quoted Dr. Appelbaum, who literally wrote a textbook on boundary violations, one was reversal of roles (the therapist using the client to justify and validate her feelings or actions) and another was self-disclosure (both of feelings and facts about her life). Get ready, this will be a roller coaster of both those things. (Also, my attorney had Dr. Appelbaum himself examine me and read through all her records, listen to recordings, and read texts and emails between us, and you’ll next see how he interprets all of this, so you don’t have to take my hurt layman’s word.)

Early in that video session, and in what felt like a profound reversal of roles, in which she seemed to be asking me to understand and validate her feelings, which was not my job as the patient, she explained her not seeming to remember her saying “I love you” on May 28 in this way:

I started that session like I would start any other with us, right? The last week, I recalled, I was in the stew of what we had been talking about… And it took me a bit. And that’s unlike me. Like there was a way that I hadn’t held in mind the intensity of the last few sessions. I let you start. We talk, you prompt me: ‘So what about last session?’ And as I’m talking to you, I’m anchoring myself. And what had happened. That’s not like me. So, I had to ask myself, what happened for me? Because I hold us in mind. And I hold on to the feelings. And I think what happened is it was too hard for me to hold it in mind. It’s scary. I don’t want to say or do the wrong thing. It feels so… I can’t think of the word beyond sensitive… Matt, I don’t have difficulty saying that I love you. That I have loving feelings for you. I wasn’t backpedaling. I had dissociated. I had not kept in mind the feelings of the last session in their fullness. I hadn’t. And I actually talked in that session about what happens for me. When things are too painful, that temporarily, I’ll look to get away from it, right? Like I’ll emotionally look to distance, I shared that with you. I didn’t have the conscious awareness that I was actually doing that in that session. That only came later.

In this explanation, Ms. Lyman conflated two sessions. She was describing our June 3 session; it was only after my breakdown, on June 4, that she told me she “doesn’t cry” and cited her young friend’s death. I assume this is the “dissociation” she mentioned, because that’s the only thing I can tie it to.

A further sampling of the things Ms. Lyman said in that session follows:

What messages have I sent you that’s caused you to feel that it that it hasn’t been real… This is so hard, and I feel horribly. I’ve never said anything that I haven’t meant, never…

I’m going to repeat that I haven’t said anything to you, about you, about how I feel about you, about how I think about our relationship that I haven’t meant.

I don’t have difficulty saying that I love you, that I have loving feelings for you. I don’t have difficulty saying that. I wasn’t backpedaling.

I couldn’t see this coming, Matt… I understand the wish, just like I wish I could make it all go away now. Matt: I’m well trained, I’m experienced, I’m well supervised. I go above and beyond with my continuing education. I’m not mucking about here. But I’m also human. And as hard and as conscientious as I hold myself to be, I have moments where I lapse, and I have to have a humility around, I can only know so much. I can only see ahead so much. The best protection against something devastating happening that I know of is to be as attuned to each other as possible. And to say what’s happening, to be able to talk about it. And to constantly be questioning where I’m coming from. In other words, my own countertransference. What are my motivations? Where are my blind spots? Because we all have them.

If you want to end, I’ll respect that. And I’ll support you and help you in any way that I can. So, I don’t want you to experience me as pressuring you, exploiting you, further seducing you. But this is me. And this is my authenticity. I want to say to you, though, as excruciatingly painful as this is, I want to be in it with you.

After nearly two hours of discussion, I again told her that I wanted to end things, explaining that I could not imagine working my way out of this with her because my terrible feelings were all centered on her.  Sam proposed that she pay for one-on-one supervision with another psychologist who could advise her.

I wasn’t really interested in that and asked her what the process is around terminating. Instead of agreeing to a termination process, she convinced me to continue to speak with her and arranged a meeting two days later. At this next session, she told me that she was now uncomfortable with her idea of one-on-one supervision, because while it was intended to facilitate my trust: “In essence, I’m saying to you, I think I need more supervision, which could only undermine trust.”  Though I was still seeking to terminate, she eventually talked me into spending the next three months meeting twice a week—which the insurance company would approve because now there was an actual crisis—to try to make sense of “how wrong [my] narrative was” and for her to take “some measure of responsibility,” and to be willing to “fumble” while doing it.

We agreed, in essence, that I must have been wrong about everything that led to my crisis—my interpretation of her “signals” primarily—and that we would try to figure out how that happened. In retrospect, I’m not sure what beside my feelings for her and my resulting ambivalence about never seeing her again, led me to accept that I was wrong about everything, that this whole thing was a misunderstanding on my part.